Jen Rulon: Where the Morphos Dance - Sobriety, Divorce, Costa Rica, and the Life Waiting
She Had It All Together. Underneath, She Was Disappearing.
Fifteen Ironman triathlons. A master's degree. Published books. A coaching career. A marriage. From the outside, Jen Rulon had every credential the world hands out for a complete life. Getting sober in 2019 was the first honest thing she'd done in years — and it made it impossible to keep pretending the rest was fine. By December 2021 she had ended the marriage, packed one bag, and moved to Costa Rica at 51 to build the life she actually chose.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Jen Rulon — 15-time Ironman finisher, published author, and midlife reinvention coach — for a conversation about the kind of endurance that doesn't come with a finish line or a medal.
Jen spent decades being the woman who had it all together. She achieved everything she set out to achieve. And somewhere in the achieving, she started to disappear. This is the story of how she found her way back — through sobriety, through the end of a marriage, and through one honest word at a time.
The Life That Looked Complete
Jen doesn't dismiss the life she built. She's clear about that. She was a Type-A goal-setter who decided at 17 that she would race the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii — and she got there. The sport taught her, in her words, not only who she was as a person but who she was as a woman. The grit and determination she earned in those races is exactly what she draws on now, in her fifties.
She and her ex-husband were, by every outward measure, crushing it. Double income, no kids, both racing — the good-looking couple everyone assumed had it figured out. Jen built her business, JenRulon.com, into a brand and a coaching practice with twenty-some athletes at a time. But underneath the highlight reel, something was quietly going unspoken.
"If there was a fight or a disagreement, what did we do? We swam, biked, and ran our way through it. We just didn't talk."
— Jen RulonConflict became one more thing to train through. A hard problem meant a long ride — "I'll talk to you in six hours." The avoidance was so seamless that when the marriage eventually ended, friends kept asking what happened. The honest answer was harder than any single event: they simply never learned to say the difficult thing out loud.
Paris, and the First Honest Crack
The shift started in 2019. Jen and her husband went to Paris — their first vacation, ever, that wasn't built around a race. Their honeymoon had been an Ironman. This time there was no start line to organize the days around, and he ended up working through most of the trip. Sitting in Paris, of all places, Jen found herself wondering why they weren't enjoying each other's company. Something was off.
Not long after, she was invited to speak at an event in Boulder, Colorado, where she heard exercise physiologist Stacy Sims deliver a message that stopped her cold: women in menopause and perimenopause should stop grinding out long, slow distance and start lifting heavy. Jen realized she was in menopause — and coming up on her fifteenth Ironman. This might be her last race. And on the drive back to her hotel after too much wine, another realization landed: why was she still drinking six weeks out from the biggest race of her season?
The Best Race of Her Life — Sober
She told her husband she wasn't drinking for six weeks. Not because she was falling-down drunk — she's careful to say she wasn't — but because two glasses of wine every night had become a habit, and the habit had become a mask. She wanted to break it.
At Ironman Florida 2019, a mile and a half into the run on Surf Drive, Jen looked out at the ocean and made a deal: either she'd qualify for Kona again, or she'd have the best race of her life and be done. She crossed the line in 10:46:43 — almost exactly the time she'd envisioned — seventh in her age group. She turned to her family and said it out loud: I'm done. The next day, offered a chance to chase a slot, she said it again. She had nothing left to prove.
"I took a sip of that celebration beer and thought — you know what? I'm good. December 6th was my last drink."
— Jen RulonThe best race of her life came without the thing she'd always paired it with. That wasn't lost on her.
Breaking the Chain
The hardest part of sobriety, Jen says, wasn't the alcohol. It was the people. Everyone wanted a reason. Are you okay? Are you pregnant? What's wrong? As if not drinking required an excuse. Her answer was simpler and harder than anything they were expecting.
"Nothing's wrong. I just want to be better than who I was yesterday. And alcohol was masking that."
— Jen RulonThere was history underneath it, too. Alcoholism ran down her dad's side of the family — her great-grandmother, her grandfather, her father. Her brother had stopped drinking a year before she did. Getting sober wasn't only a personal decision; it was a chain she was choosing to break.
One Bag to Costa Rica
Sobriety didn't save the marriage. It made it impossible to keep pretending the marriage was fine. After a trial separation — which, Jen warns anyone considering one, tends not to end the way you hope — she asked for a divorce in July 2021. The papers went out by Labor Day.
She had loved the water her whole life, and she knew there were only three places she'd move: California, Hawaii, or Costa Rica. She's a sunset baby, a Pacific-coast girl at heart. She chose Costa Rica — a country where she knew almost no one, which turned out to be part of the point. Back home, everyone already knew her as the Ironman, the coach, the TEDx speaker, the author. When her brother told her she was just running away from the marriage, she corrected him.
"No, I'm not running away. I'm running back to the girl I once was."
— Jen RulonParadise Has Hard Days, Too
Jen is honest about the fantasy of the fresh start. She's currently sitting in a container home she dreamed of and built herself — on a hill, because ocean view was out of budget no matter where she looked. She wakes to howler monkeys, watches scarlet macaws fly past, and has butterflies everywhere. It's beautiful. It was also genuinely hard to build, and the roads that take two hours to travel twenty-five miles will humble anyone romanticizing island life.
Asked what the hardest part of the move actually was, she doesn't say the logistics or the loneliness. She says it was trusting her own gut — and not letting the naysayers, however well-meaning, talk her out of the life she knew she needed.
Just because you live in paradise, she says, doesn't mean you get easy days. It means you get to choose whose voice you listen to on the hard ones.
Performance vs. Becoming
Amanda names something powerful in the conversation: Jen has now lived two complete lives. So what's the difference between a life that looks complete and a life you actually chose?
In the first one, Jen says, she was performing — striving, proving, trying to hold everyone's attention. She did everything she said she'd do: Hawaii, the book, the TEDx stage. But she was trying to look the part. What she is now is different.
"In my first life I was performing. What I am now is authentic. It's real. It's no BS."
— Jen RulonShe describes looking at old photos of the triathlete she used to be — ripped, cut, all six-pack abs and hard edges — and then looking in the mirror now. She's still strong, still fit. But softer. More herself. "I love who I've become," she says. It's a line that only carries weight because of everything it cost to be able to say it.
For the Women Who Are Good at Whispering
Jen is writing a memoir, Where the Morphos Dance, for every woman who has ever been very good at whispering. The whole thrust of her coaching now — through movement, mindset, metabolism, and meaning — is helping women reclaim a voice: the voice to say what they want, not what they think others expect them to want.
She tells a story about Meryl Streep turning down the first offer for The Devil Wears Prada, then naming an enormous number when asked what she wanted — because, as Jen puts it, "I don't need them, they need me." The lesson she draws for the women she coaches: never undervalue your own worth. And it starts, she believes, physically — building strength in the gym first, then learning to carry that same strength internally, into a conversation with a partner, a boss, a friend.
Her advice to any woman in that quiet, unsettled place — who knows something isn't right but hasn't said it out loud, even to herself — is to find the right person to talk to. Not someone who will pour their own fears into you, but a friend, mentor, coach, or peer who will push for you, not for everyone else.
Want to work with Jen or follow her next chapter? Learn about her coaching and her retreat, Rise with the Tides (Samara, Costa Rica, December 6–12), at jenrulon.com.
Her memoir, Where the Morphos Dance, releases 11/11/2026. Find her on Instagram and TikTok at Coach Jen Rulon.
Why This Conversation Matters
Jen Rulon had every credential the world offers for a complete life — and found, in the honest dark of 2019, that the completeness had been a performance. The life she actually wanted was waiting on the other side of one true word.
As Amanda puts it in her closing: reinvention doesn't start with a bold move. It starts the moment you stop pretending you're fine. The life you've been quietly grieving isn't gone. It's waiting.
What have you been whispering that you already know you need to say out loud?
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